"To Think Great Thoughts. . ."

At 20 he left Harvard to join the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers. He was wounded at Ball's Bluff. Antietam and Fredericksburg. He was mustered out in 1864 a captain. Returning to Harvard, he took a law degree, lectured on constitutional law and jurisprudence, edited The American Law Review, practiced briefly in Boston. For 20 years he sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. In 1902 President Roosevelt appointed him to the U. S. Supreme Court. There he quickly grew famed for his liberal thought, for the clarity and grace of his expression, for the vigor and regularity with which he dissented from the opinions of a conservative majority. Leaving his Capitol office one day in 1932, aged 90, he said to his assistants, "I won't be in tomorrow." Thus, simply, he withdrew to the quiet of his old-fashioned red brick house on Washington's I Street.

All last week there filed up the icy front steps of that house a procession of famed citizens. At 93 Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes lay desperately ill of pneumonia. To his solemn-faced physicians, nurses and friends, Mr. Justice Holmes growled: "It's a lot of damned foolery."

His longtime friend Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard emerged to report: "Mr. Holmes is in good spirits. He's kidding his nurses." Chairman Francis Biddle of the National Labor Relations Board, one of that long series of fledgling Harvard Law graduates who have been honored by one-year appointments as the great jurist's secretary, reported that, catching Professor Frankfurter tiptoeing by his bed, Mr. Justice Holmes had merrily thumbed his nose.

As oxygen tanks were brought in, the stream of visitors continued. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson called. So did Mr. Justice Sutherland. President Roosevelt kept in touch by telephone. Chief Justice Hughes called, and Mr. Justice Brandeis. Finally when his life could be sustained only by constant oxygen, admittance was denied to every visitor but one. This week, as Mr. Justice Holmes's 94th year was drawing to an end, physicians announced that that Last Visitor was at his door.

Physician-Author Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Justice's father, was and still is popularly famed as a poet and essayist. But the fame of his pioneer work in conquering the scourge of puerperal (childbed) fever will be fresh when The Chambered Nautilus and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table are moldering on scholars' shelves. So, too, his own world has saluted Mr. Justice Holmes as the first jurist and first gentleman of his time. But the world a century hence may well honor him best as a great philosopher, whose creative thought chanced to be channelled into the law. At once creed, autobiography and epitaph is a passage from a speech he made to Harvard students years ago:

"No man has earned the right to intellectual ambition until he has learned to lay his course by a star which he has never seen--to dig by the divining rod for springs which he may never reach. . . . To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone--when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will--then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought --the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army."

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